Does the Pagan King Reply? Malayalam Documents on the Portuguese Arrival in India
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Itinerario, Vol. 43, No. 3, 423–442. © 2019 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be
obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
doi:10.1017/S0165115319000536
Does the Pagan King Reply? Malayalam
Documents on the Portuguese Arrival in
India
MAHMOOD KOORIA*
Email: mahmoodpana@gmail.com; m.kooriadathodi@hum.leidenuniv.nl
This article is a response to Sebastian Prange’s essay in Itinerario 41, no. 1 (2017): 151–
173 wherein he presented a ‘virtually unknown manuscript’ on the Portuguese arrival in
India as an Indian voice, unheard in the existing historiography. Prange had consulted
the English translation of a Malayalam text by John Wye, that the former had assumed
to be lost. However its original palm-leaf manuscript (ōla) is kept at the British Library.
This ōla, entitled Kēraḷa Varttamānam, brings to light some remarkable omissions and a
few discrepancies in Wye’s translation. Closely reading different manuscripts in
Malayalam, Arabic, and English I argue that this ōla is in fact a translation of a six-
teenth-century Arabic text, Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, well known among scholars of its place
and period. Taking it a step ahead, I argue that the very existence of this text points towards
the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic interactions between the Arabic and Malayalam
spheres of premodern Malabar. The ōla demonstrates one of the first instances of
Malayalam literature’s engagement with a secular and historical theme as the arrival of
the Portuguese. In addition, Malayalam works such as Kēraḷōlpatti and Kēraḷa-paḻama
are clear voices from Malabar on the Portuguese arrival and consequent episodes.
Keywords: South India, Malabar, Portuguese, Arabic, Malayalam, translation, literary
interactions
In Itinerario 41, no. 1 (2017), Sebastian Prange introduced, edited, and transcribed a
“virtually unknown manuscript on the Portuguese arrival in India” which arguably pro-
vides an Indian voice unheard in the existing historiography that is “characterized by an
inherently European perspective” with explicit focus on European themes and actors.1
The manuscript in question is “Translation of a History of the Portuguese Landing in
India, Written on the Leaves of the Brab Tree (Called Ola) in the Malabar Language”
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by John William Wye, an officer in the English East India Company in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, it is a fascinating document, previously unpub-
lished, preserved in two manuscripts at the British Library (India Office Records, MS.
IO Eur. K.194 and K.195). In the introduction to the text, Prange invites attention to
the importance of the manuscript by explaining how it has been continuously overlooked
in the scholarship on early modern South Asia, the Indian Ocean world, and Portuguese
expansion. He speculates about the original Malayalam ōla (palm-leaf) manuscript,
which might have been lost along with several other manuscripts produced in the
Malabar Coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
However, the original ōla of Wye’s translation has survived and is kept nowhere else
but at the very same British Library. Comparing this original ōla against the English
translation brings to light some remarkable omissions as well as a few discrepancies.
These place Prange’s arguments in a different light, while contributing to our understand-
ing of historical literary interactions between the Malayalam and Arabic spheres of south-
ern India in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
The Malayalam ōla manuscript is titled Kēraḷa Varttamānam, neatly written in
twenty-eight palm-leaf folios of 10 x 1 inches, inscribed on both sides with five lines
on each side. It has been catalogued as Malayalam manuscript no. 11* of the British
Library and has been microfilmed as IOL, Neg. 824.2 Its copying was finished on 25
Karkaṭakam 967 of Malayalam Era, which corresponds to 20 August 1792 CE. We do
not know the exact date of compilation, but the events described in the text end in
763 of Kollam Era or 998 Hijri Era, which corresponds to 1588 CE, and this might indi-
cate the potential time of its writing.
In the following, I identify the source of this text on the basis of the original ōla
vis-à-vis its translation by John Wye. A missing sentence in the translation informs us
about its Arabic source, which I argue is the Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn by Zayn al-Dīn
al-Malaybārī (d. ca. 1583). In order to substantiate this, I compare and connect both
texts (along with their English and Malayalam translations) and point towards a few con-
vergences and divergences in the translation process. In the next section, I elaborate on the
ways in which the original Malayalam ōla itself was translated from the Arabic source, with
at least two people involved. This interaction between Malayalam and Arabic literary
spheres in premodern Kerala is notable, for we know of few other such exchanges between
Arabic and Malayalam in the premodern context despite both languages coexisting in the
same geographical, chronological, and cultural terrain. In the last section, I come back to
the question of whether we have any other primary sources in Malayalam on the
Portuguese arrival at the Malabar Coast. As an answer, I suggest a few titles such as
Kēraḷa-paḻama and Kēraḷōlpatti which await further scholarly research.
A Hidden/Removed Source
Based on Wye’s translation, Prange endeavours to characterise the translated text as a
Malayalam original in which for first time we hear the voice of the local Hindu kingdom
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of the Zamorins: “It affords, pace Camões, a distant echo of the pagan king speaking at
last.”3 However, what is interestingly missing in Wye’s translation is a sentence that puts
this claim into question. The Malayalam manuscript states that it is written on the basis
of an Arabic narrative from the House of the Qāḍī, the Muslim judge, in Calicut. The
last sentence in the manuscript reads: “Śrī gurubhyō namaḥ subhastuḥ ī varttamānam kol-
lam 25 Karkaṭakam 967nu koḻikkoṭṭa kātiyāruṭe kissāvil ninnu paṟaññu eḻutippatatre,”
which means “Blessings and salutations to the guru, this is the good end. This account
(varttamānam) has been written down on dictation from the kissa of Calicut’s qāḍī on 25
Karkaṭakam 967 KE” [1792 CE]. It is quite possible that there were other copies or recen-
sions of the text that may not have contained this passage and Wye might have used one of
those, but the contextual evidence and the close proximity of both this manuscript and its
translation in terms of their production, chronology, and later trajectories ending up at the
British Library point to the likelihood that Wye depended on this manuscript for his trans-
lation rather than another copy or recension. In any event, this very important statement on
its source is one of four sentences omitted in the Wye translation. Absence of this informa-
tion has led Prange to speculate on the original source, but the Malayalam text clearly indi-
cates that its source was the kissa (transmitted orally or textually) at the Qāḍī House in
Calicut. It is widely known among Malabar historians and scholars that the Qāḍī House
hosts several Arabic and Arabic-Malayalam manuscripts, many of which have been handed
down through generations. Only a few scholars have utilised this collection in order to
unravel or survey the rich literary, linguistic, and religious traditions of Muslims in Malabar.4
The term kissa used in this sentence does not specify any particular text. It is a Malayalam
word derived from the Arabic word qiṣṣa, which means story, narrative, account, or tale. In the
Malabar Coast, the term qiṣṣa was used to indicate any stories related to Islamic traditions or
Muslim communities. The most renowned, and possibly the oldest, text to use the term is the
Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ (Tale of Cakṟavartti Perumāḷ), an Arabic text that narrates the story
of a Malabar king who left his kingdom for Arabia in the early seventh century and embraced
Islam at the hand of the Prophet Muhammad.5 In nineteenth-century Arabic-Malayalam lit-
erature (Malayalam written in Arabic script, similar to Jāwī for Malay, Arwī for Tamil, and
Aljamiado for European languages), the term became very popular in the titles of songs
and accounts of historical and ahistorical figures of Islam. The qiṣṣa, although it primarily
referred to the written texts, is not limited to textual narratives alone. Rather, it was also
used for oral traditions, as we see all across the Islamic world. It was a generic term for all
sorts of tales and histories in general, while tārīkh, an Arabic term for history and chronicles,
was almost unused earlier in the Malabar context.6 The Kēraḷa Varttamānam’s acknowledge-
ment of a kissa from the Qāḍī House along with a reference to the translation-cum-scribal
process indicates its Arabic source preserved in the written form.
Translating the Tuḥfa
Which text was the Arabic source of the Kēraḷa Varttamānam? With no doubt, I can say
that it is the Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn fī Baʿḍ Akhbār al-Burtuġāliyyīn (Gift for warriors with
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some accounts on the Portuguese) of Zayn al-Dīn al-Malaybārī. The close similarities in
contents and discussions between the Kēraḷa Varttamānam in Malayalam (and the Wye
translation in English) and the Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn (henceforth Tuḥfa) in Arabic are not
accidental overlaps. Rather, the former emerges from the latter. The Malayalam is often a
sentence-to-sentence translation of the Tuḥfa, to an extent that a dictated translation can
render it accurately. The ideas, phrases, and expressions stand in close proximity and the
chronological order and narrative structure are the same. To exemplify the interconnec-
tions between the texts as translations, we can take some random sections from both
texts and compare them. In an initial section on the chieftaincies and rulers in
Malabar, the Tuḥfa states:
There are in chieftains whose territories do not exceed one parasang, while others have
powers over more extensive territories. Of these some have at their command one hun-
dred soldiers or less, or two hundred to three hundred, thousand, five thousand, ten thou-
sand, thirty thousand, hundred thousand and more, and so on. Some territories join in
league and are governed by two or three persons together. And of them some have greater
power and bigger army. Quarrels and skirmishes take place occasionally among them, but
this does not affect their coalition rule.
The Kēraḷa Varttamānam translates the same passage:
Some of those kings had one kātam of kingdom and some more. There were rulers with
forces consisting of hundred, two hundred, three hundred, thousand, five thousand, ten
thousand, thirty thousand, hundred thousand and even more soldiers. Some countries
were ruled jointly by two kings. Some others have three or more kings. In the kingdom
jointly ruled by two kings, they would not quarrel or trespass in the boundaries, even if
one of the two was stronger. Even if anyone of the joint rulers was away, it did not affect
their unity.7
The Wye manuscript also has the same passage, except he slightly mistranslates the last
sentence as “if any did quarrel, he would get no one to assist him,” for it has a very com-
plicated sentence structure in Malayalam.8
In another description of the tussles between the Portuguese, Zamorins, and Muslims
in the early sixteenth century, the Tuḥfa says:
Then the accursed Portuguese began to build a solid fort while the subjects of the
Zamorin set out to the Arabian ports in four ships laden with pepper and dried ginger.
Like others, they too began to make trade trips as before to Gujarat and other destinations
carrying passes from the Portuguese. This was in the year 920 or 921 HE. By the time the
first four ships to the Arabian ports returned to Calicut, the Portuguese had completed the
construction of their fort in Calicut. Then they forbade Muslims from making further
trips to the Arabian ports with pepper and ginger in their ships. Thus, they wanted to
monopolise the trade in pepper and dried ginger. Whenever they saw even a small quan-
tity of these two spices in any ship, they seized the ship, its contents and its crew.
The Kēraḷa Varttamānam translates the same passage:
When the Portuguese began to construct the fort, the Mappilas began sailing to the
Arabian coast in four ships laden with dried ginger and pepper. They took the pass
and flag of the Portuguese. That was in 921 AH/689 KE. The ships bound for Mecca
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disposed of their cargo and returned to Calicut, while the Portuguese finished the con-
struction of the fort. After this, the Portuguese declared that they would not permit the
export of dried ginger and pepper to Mecca. They insisted that nobody other than them-
selves should involve in the trade of pepper and ginger. They started the trade themselves.
They began to seize all the cargoes and the contents whenever they saw even a piece of
dried ginger or grain of pepper in a ship.9
I cite these passages at length only to show how the Tuḥfa has been translated in the
Kēraḷa Varttamānam. These passages represent the larger characteristics in the tone
and style of the translation, fluctuating from sentence-to-sentence adaptations with simi-
lar idioms and word structures to selective additions, omissions, summarisations, and ela-
borations. In the following, I shall demonstrate the convergence and divergence between
the original text and the translation, noting that any free translation takes some liberties
for the target audience.
The first part of the Kēraḷa Varttamānam is a translation of Section 2 of the Tuḥfa
(titled “History of the Advent and Spread of Islam in Malabar”). The story of a local
king’s journey to Arabia and conversion to Islam (which the Tuḥfa possibly took from
the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ mentioned above10) is summarised in a few lines standing
within the narrative frame of the Tuḥfa. From there, the Kēraḷa Varttamānam narrates the
whole remaining section with some minimal elaboration. It avoids Section 3 (“Certain
Strange Customs of the Hindus in Malabar”) of the Tuḥfa and comes straight to
Section 4 (“The Arrival of the Portuguese in Malabar and a Brief Account of their
Shameful Deeds”) and translates the following chapters with some liberties of selection
and deletion.
In chapter 1 (all the chapters mentioned henceforward refer to the chapters of the
Tuḥfa; the Kēraḷa Varttamānam does not provide chapterisation), a paragraph-length
explanation in the Tuḥfa on why the Zamorins of Calicut attacked the kings of Cochin
in the early sixteenth century when the latter helped the Portuguese and the consequent
usurpation of the throne is left out. Following the second battle with the Portuguese and
Cochin, the Tuḥfa’s discussion on the Zamorins’ draining economy due to wars, their
search for support from the foreign kingdoms of Gujarat, Bijapur, and Egypt and the fol-
lowing battles in Diu, Aden, and Jeddah all have been left out. Instead it comes straight to
the Portuguese attack on the Nākhuda Mithqāl Mosque in Calicut. It keeps all other
details before and after, except for a description of a battle in Aden, which has also
been omitted. This does not mean that the text is entirely parochialised by eliminating
all the encounters outside Malabar, because it also discusses the Portuguese expeditions
and battles in Goa in this section.
The text also tones down the Muslim/Islamic voice apparent in the Tuḥfa through
selective deletion of sentences. It normalises fights which are otherwise described with
a religious undertone in the Tuḥfa as Muslims fighting a holy war in the cause of
Allah. Likewise, it also avoids intermittent prayers of the Tuḥfa in support of the
Muslims and Zamorins as well as curses against the Portuguese using Islamic idioms.
It also does not subscribe to the religious and political overtones of the Tuḥfa. When
the Tuḥfa says, for example, that Adil Shah defeated the Portuguese and made Goa
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once again “part of Islamic territory” (dār al-Islam), the Kēraḷa Varttamānam only men-
tions that he reconquered the land. Along these lines, it removes the entire chapter 2
(“Certain Shameful Deeds of the Portuguese”) in which the Tuḥfa laments about the
Portuguese attacks against Muslim traders, pilgrims, travellers, settlements, and
institutions.
In chapter 3, the Kēraḷa Varttamānam removes the Tuḥfa’s derogatory descriptions of
the Portuguese and their tactics and manners. It follows the Tuḥfa in the remaining parts,
except in the last paragraph where the Tuḥfa discusses the Portuguese battles in Jeddah.
In chapter 4, the descriptions of the battle between Muslims and Portuguese at
Pantalāyani Kollam and another fight between Muslims and Jews at Koṭuṅṅallūr, both
in 1524, have been removed. The last portion of this chapter, a brief account of a
trade trip by some merchants in Malabar to Gujarat in 1530–1531 and consequent battles
and events also has been removed. In Chapter 5, the section on the second
Zamorin-Portuguese treaty is shortened significantly. The last part in this chapter, on
the Portuguese battle in Diu, is also removed. The penultimate section on the
Zamorin’s fight with the chieftain of Cāliyam is shortened in order to combine it with
the descriptions of the Zamorin’s fight and treaty with the king of Tānūr mentioned in
chapter 6 of the Tuḥfa. It also avoids other details from chapter 6. All other details of
chapters 3 to 6 are the same. It skips chapters 7 to 10 of the Tuḥfa entirely. It mentions
the fifth Zamorin-Portuguese treaty of 1555 (chapter 11 of the Tuḥfa) in one sentence,
while again skipping most details of chapters 12 to 14 of the Tuḥfa.
In the next brief section, the Kēraḷa Varttamānam provides a quick run-through of
some events in a chronological order. To give some examples, it mentions Kuṭṭi
Pōkkar Marakkār’s capture of Portuguese ships as an event that happened in 970 AH
(or 739 Kollam Era), whereas the Tuḥfa mentions two such captures. One happened
on Saturday, 8 Jamād al-Ākhir, 976 AH/1568 CE and the other towards the end of
Jamād al-Ākhir, 978 AH/1570 CE.11 But it does not provide the date 970 the Kēraḷa
Varttamānam mentions. The following description in the Kēraḷa Varttamānam of the
Zamorin’s battle with Cochin in 974 AH/743 Kollam Era and his subterfuge with the
king of Tānūr to escape the Portuguese seizure are not mentioned in the Tuḥfa. The fol-
lowing two incidents, the Zamorin’s victory over the Portuguese at Cāliyam in 979 AH/
1571CE/747 KE and the Zamorin-Portuguese peace treaty of 992 AH/1583 CE/760 KE
are mentioned in the Tuḥfa in great detail, in chapters 13 and 14 respectively. The Kēraḷa
Varttamānam reduces those into each sentence. Following these two descriptions, it pro-
vides another incident as its last account: an event happened in 998 AH/766 KE: “The
Portuguese seized a vessel of the king at sea and consequently they again quarrelled.”
This incident is also not mentioned in the Tuḥfa, which ends with a narrative in 1584.
The discrepancy in the year for Kuṭṭi Pōkkar Marakkār and the two additional events
unmentioned in the Tuḥfa indicate that the Kēraḷa Varttamānam depended on an add-
itional source to produce this information, unless its author witnessed the events himself
or herself. It is possible that the author added these events based on firsthand information
or translated, noted, or copied it down from a different informant or material. It is difficult
to know the source of these details, especially the differences between the manuscripts of
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the Tuh ̣fa are yet to be studied. Despite its wide circulation among historians both in the
Arabic original and in translations, there is no critical edition.
There are a few trivial methodological changes too. While the Tuḥfa sometimes spec-
ulates on the numbers of ships or victims of war, the Kēraḷa Varttamānam always goes to
the highest numbers provided in the Tuḥfa. For example, on the number of Portuguese
ships that came to the Malabar Coast in 1503, the Tuḥfa gives different possibilities vary-
ing from twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two to twenty-eight and eighteen.12 The Kēraḷa
Varttamānam mentions twenty-eight without any speculation.13 At another occasion, the
numbers killed in the first encounter between the Portuguese and Calicut is sixty or sev-
enty in the Tuḥfa, whereas it is seventy in the Kēraḷa Varttamānam. Similarly, in one of
the first battles between Cochin and Calicut in the early sixteenth century, the number of
Cochin royals killed is two or three in the Tuḥfa, whereas it is undoubted three in the
Kēraḷa Varttamānam.
The discrepancies in numbers and dates and the selection and deletion of particular
portions are intentional choices by the translator. Such issues are noticeable once we
read the text closely against the original, and this aspect does not nullify the foundational
fact that the Kēraḷa Varttamānam is a translation of the Tuḥfa to the extent that a render-
ing can reproduce an original text authentically in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
This text, whether in Wye’s translation or in its Malayalam original, therefore cannot be
taken as an exclusive and revelatory voice of the pagan king with “insights into the
actions and attitudes of Malabar’s political elite,” as Prange argues. Nor is it a document
belonging to the granthavari tradition that Kerala Brahmins followed to record events. It
is only a rendering of the voice of the Tuḥfa that Prange discredits because “the words
and motives of the Hindu sovereign are once more attributed to him by others.”14
Instead of presenting the text as an exclusive Malayalam source on the Portuguese
arrival, both the Tuḥfa and Kēraḷa Varttamānam should be understood as interconnected
indigenous sources (without discriminating on the basis of the language) that have great
potential to describe events in the voices of the local people.
Prange’s argument that the Malayalam text is not a copy of Zayn al-Dīn’s work should
be reconsidered. His approach takes the ways in which certain Malayalam words are trea-
ted within the Arabic text and, with the help of an example, he argues that confusing a
descriptive designator for a personal name “is easy enough to reconstruct under the
assumption of a Malayalam-to-Arabic translation, whereas it becomes nonsensical in
the reverse.”15 The example he uses is the term “Eliatha” (or Iḷayatu) in the Wye trans-
lation for a minister of the Zamorin. He writes that this term is rendered as the name
“al-Yadh” in the Arabic text. I argue that this is a misreading of the Arabic text and
its Arabic-Malayalam context. Prange, as well as the English translator Nainar, misread
and mistranslate the term as a personal name.16 In the British Library manuscript he
cited, the term is written as ﺍﻟﻴﺬwithout short vowel marks.17 Those who are familiar
with only Arabic would read it as ( ﺍﻟ َﻴ ْﺪal-yad), as Prange and Nainar have done.
However, we are dealing with a Malayalam word in an Arabic text: It is a Malayalam
term that should be vocalised as ( ﺍِﻟَ َﻴ ْﺬIlayaḏ), as it has been done in another British
Library manuscript and a Royal Asiatic Society manuscript.18 The diacritical dot
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above “( ”ﺫḏ) in all these manuscripts should not be overlooked, for it indicates the
Malayalam dental consonant ta (ത), which in this context should be pronounced aspi-
rated with more voice than the usual ta.19 To indicate this aspirated spelling, the scribe or
the author must have brought a hypercorrection to the Arabic letter ﺫ. It was a common
practice for Malabar Muslims in general and for Zayn al-Dīn in particular to write
Malayalam phrases or words in Arabic script, and had been since the sixteenth century,
if not before. The whole Arabic-Malayalam literature is a product of this writing practice.
Zayn al-Dīn has written many Malayalam words in the Arabic script elsewhere in the
Tuḥfa as well as in his other Arabic texts, in addition to transliterating several
Malayalam names of places and people into Arabic script.20
Moreover, Iḷayatu in this context does not follow what Prange assumes is “a com-
monly used Malayalam word for ‘younger one’; this minister was likely a junior relation
of the Zamorin.”21 In fact, it was a common title for the second minister of the Zamorins,
similar to the way the title Zamorin (Malayal. Sāmūtiri) was borne by the incumbent
ruler.22 Besides these, the text has many more Arabic terms which are uncommon in a
pure Malayalam text, ranging from words such as tārīh (Arabic tārīkh: “date”; wrongly
translated/transliterated by Wye as “Talika”) repeated on almost every page to mausam
(Arabic mawsim: “season”), kāti (Arabic qāḍī: “judge”), kissa (Arabic qiṣṣa: story).
These terms are seldom used in premodern Malayalam texts and thus indicate that this
text depended on an Arabic source, or more precisely the Tuḥfa of Zayn al-Dīn. This
is further ensured by the plain mention of Hijri Era throughout the text along with the
Kollam Era. A premodern Malayalam text, to my knowledge, would never include a
Hijri Era in its chronology, and the fact that this text repeatedly cites both Kollam and
Hijri eras, along with the aforesaid Arabic vocabularies, indicates a translation process
that accommodates the norms and concerns of both the source and target languages.
Translation Process
The next question is who translated this text from Arabic to Malayalam. The source as
such does not specify the translator or the process. Whoever he or she may be, the writer
was either well versed in the Malayalam and Arabic languages in order to address both
target and original languages, or she or he had immediate access to translator(s) who
helped him or her with the Arabic or Malayalam text. The sentence at the end of the
Kēraḷa Varttamānam indicates this latter possibility, as it reads “koḻikkoṭṭa kātiyāruṭe
kissāvil ninnu paṟaññu eḻutippatatre,” that is, the text “has been written down on dicta-
tion from the kissa of Calicut’s qāḍī.” The compound verbal form “paṟaññu
eḻutippatatre” literally means “had told to be written” or “written down while dictating.”
This indicates the mode and method of translation-cum-interpretation of the text. There
may have been a Malayali Muslim scholar who read the Tuḥfa in Arabic and summarised
it in Malayalam for a Hindu scribe/scholar who noted it down with his or her own addi-
tions. The text has a good influence of Māppiḷa Malayalam (or Arabi-Malayalam) in
which Arabic is a predominant influence, and as a script-practice was widely written
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in the Arabic script up until the mid-twentieth century. Several words, phrases, or usages
emerge from Māppiḷa usages, such as tārīkh (for date/history) and mausam (season,
monsoon in particular). The nature of sentence construction becomes clear once we com-
pare it with the early Arabic-Malayalam texts such as the Muḥy al-Dīn Māla, written in
the early seventeenth century, and Kappappāṭṭu and Nūl Madḥ from the eighteenth
century.
The addition of prayers in the Brahmanical (or Hindu) style at the beginning and end
of the text (Hariḥ in the beginning; Śrī gurubhyō namaḥ subhastuḥ at the end) under-
score the possibility that the Malayalam part was written by a Hindu. Although it is def-
initely possible, so far we do not have evidence from premodern Malabar to suggest that
a Hindu scribe or scholar in the region mastered Arabic to the point of translating a
historical text. The same goes the other way as well: even though it is possible, we do
not yet have solid evidence to suggest that a Malayali Muslim would write prayers in
Brahmanical style in his or her text with a high incidence of Sanskrit phrases.
Furthermore, an interesting division in Kerala manuscript culture reaffirms this phenom-
enon: all Arabic manuscripts from the sixteenth to eighteenth century are in paper,
whereas most Malayalam materials from the same period are in palm-leaf. This division
in writing habits and uses of materials along linguistic and religious lines is yet to be
studied thoroughly, but the larger known patterns suggest that the scribe/scholar for
the Malayalam text came from a Hindu background and the oral translator had a
Malayali Muslim background. The absence of Sanskrit terms and idioms besides the
prayers and remarks at the opening and closing lines (the Malayalam literature in
the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is highly influenced by Sanskrit vocabulary) and
the presence of several Arabic words throughout the text further strengthens this argu-
ment. This independent translation-cum-interpretation process is obvious in its bringing
together of the Kollam Era with the Hijri Era. It does not replace the Islamic calendar, but
rather synthesises it with the Kollam. In the same mode, John Wye also must have had a
local interpreter to translate some nuanced words and usages. It is remarkable how accur-
ately he translates some confusing Malayalam terms like varṣam (usually used for year,
but in the particular context of this text, for rain) and tīppeṭṭu (royal death).
A further question arises: when was the Kēraḷa Varttamānam written? There are two
possibilities: either in the late sixteenth century or in the late eighteenth century. We men-
tioned above that the text at its final lines mentions briefly two incidents that happened in
the late sixteenth century which are unmentioned in the Tuḥfa: the Zamorin’s battle with
Cochin in 974 AH/743 Kollam Era and his subterfuge with the king of Tānūr to escape
the Portuguese seizure of a vessel of the Zamorin in 998 AH/766 KE, leading to further
quarrels between both sides. I mentioned above that these additions indicate that the
Kēraḷa Varttamānam depended on an additional source for these two incidents.
Possibly, the translator and/or the scribe witnessed these events and thought of including
them. If this is the case, the text was written in the late sixteenth century. But if the colo-
phon of the Kēraḷa Varttamānam on its year of writing (1792) can be taken at its face
value, it was produced only in 1792 as a free translation, possibly at the request of
British officials such as John Wye who would eventually translate it into English. If
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this is the case, what is its source for the two incidents mentioned above? Possibilities
include other local or Portuguese texts that record the events.23
Implications of the Text
The very existence of the Kēraḷa Varttamānam and the fact that it is a rendering of an
Arabic text makes it unique in premodern Malayalam literature in several respects.
First of all, it is a complete text preserved in original Malayalam describing the
Portuguese arrival in the Malabar Coast, probably the only one of its kind. Few of the
premodern Malayalam literary texts available to us from the period during
the Portuguese and Dutch presence between 1500 and 1800 discuss the European expan-
sion or presence in detail. This silence is surprising in light of the Europeans’ remarkable
interventions in the region through centuries of conflict, commerce, conciliation, contri-
bution, and disruption. Most of the Malayalam texts available to us from the period
belong to the genres of Hindu bhakti spirituality, epic, humour, and hagiography. A
few other exceptions to this pattern would include the Paṭappāṭṭu (War Song), on the
Dutch conquest of Cochin in the 1660s, the Kēraḷōtpatti and Kēraḷanāṭakam on the
mythical origin of the province with a brief section on the Portuguese in the former,
and Māmāṅkaṃ Kiḷippāṭṭu, on one particular Zamorin.24 All these texts were written
in the seventeenth century. The only Malayalam materials on the Portuguese available
from the sixteenth century are a few fragmentary records from the Zamorins’ palace
records, commonly known as Koḻikkōṭan Granthavari.25 All these aspects make the
Kēraḷa Varttamānam even more special as it is written exclusively and elaborately on
the Portuguese encounters with the Zamorins in the sixteenth century.
Secondly, this absence of Malayalam texts on the theme is even more surprising once
we compare it with the survival and presence of at least five Arabic texts written in
Malabar in the sixteenth century on the Portuguese alone. Such Arabic texts, with strong
jihadi contents, produced from the early decades of the sixteenth century till its last dec-
ades, are splendid evidences of the local responses to the Portuguese incursions. The
most renowned among those is the Tuḥfa, but there are four more texts.26 This impressive
number of Arabic texts vis-à-vis the silence of the Malayalam literary sphere would have
been an enigmatic phenomenon, were it not for the Kēraḷa Varttamānam.
Thirdly, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries we have several religious, meta-
physical, hagiographical, epic, and/or humorous works in both Malayalam and Arabic, pro-
duced from the same Malabar microregions, such as Ponnāni. In fact, Tuñchattu
Eḻuttacchan, the so-called founder of modern Malayalam literature, is said to have born
and brought up in the vicinity of Ponnāni and produced his epics Ādhyātma
Rāmāyaṇam and Mahābhāratam Kiḷippāṭṭu in this area.27 The author of the Tuḥfa,
Zayn al-Dīn, was brought up in the same locality. He studied and taught at the Ponnāni
Mosque-College for several years, just like his father, uncle, and grandfather, who all
were renowned scholars of Islam and produced several texts in Arabic which continue
to be in circulation across the Indian Ocean world and beyond.28 His grandfather Zayn
al-Dīn Sr. (d. 1522) wrote the first known anti-Portuguese treatise in Arabic from
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Malabar, titled Taḥrīḍ ahl al-īmān ʿalā jihād ʿabadat ṣulbān (Inciting believers to fight
against cross-worshippers) in the early decades of the sixteenth century when the conflicts
between the Portuguese and the Zamorins of Calicut were in initial stage.29 Despite of their
geographical, chronological, and cultural proximities, we do not come across any evidence
of literary interactions between the Malayalam literary sphere and the Arabic literary
sphere. We do not see them even acknowledging each other’s presence in their writings,
let alone citing each other’s works, following genres, or discussing similar themes.
While one group wrote in Malayalam, creating new trends in the region or following
the larger Sanskrit literary patterns in discussing metaphysical, religious, and epic themes,
morals, and teachings, the other group produced works in Arabic following the textual
longue durée of Islamic literary productions in law, mysticism, ethics, and hagiographies.30
All the texts available to us from either side are limited to their own long textual, intellec-
tual, and religious genealogies, and are hardly in conversation with one another. In the
known palm-leaf documents in particular we rarely come across any references to the
Arabic texts. This disconnectedness between the inhabitants of the same Indian Ocean
town is intriguing given the long span of at least three centuries. In this general pattern
too, the Kēraḷa Varttamānam stands in sharp contrast by presenting a fascinating story
of larger cross-cultural and cross-language exchanges between the two spheres.
Copying the Kēraḷa Varttamānam was finished on 25 Karkaṭakam 967 KE (1792 CE).
This date is interesting as it is the same year in which Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r. 1782–
1799) handed over the rule of Malabar to the English East India Company. The arrival of
the English and their takeover of the region must have stirred the historical memory of the
copyist (and the translator if it was translated in this period), those who funded them, and
their potential audience about the earlier advent of another European empire that created
significant ruptures in the social and political scenarios of the region, as narrated in the
Kēraḷa Varttamānam. Its historicised memory eventually became enacted history in the
following decades when the local communities of Malabar resiliently resisted English
colonisation through a series of battles very similar to their fights against the
Portuguese. In that respect, the text became an epilogue to (and a memory of) the
Portuguese arrival, but a prologue to (and a prophecy of) the English arrival.
Within a year of its completion, in 1793, a copy was in the hands of English officials.
Two Indian scholars note that the British acquired the manuscript from Valiya Qāḍī of
Calicut, but they do not give any references on how this happened.31 If true this is
even more interesting, in the sense that it would tell us about the potential possessors
of the original manuscript, its original author, their group association, and so on.
However, this is contradicted by the colophon at the end of the Wye’s translation,
which provides firsthand information that the document was “presented” to the
Englishman by the Venkatycotta Raja of the Zamorin family. John Wye translated it
into English by 1800, and at least two copies survived.32 The form and structure, and
additional notes in the margins of these two manuscripts, indicate that his translation
was read and circulated by several hands.
The Kēraḷa Varttamānam is not an unknown text to historians in Kerala, although they
have not used it much to study the Portuguese encounters with Malabar or other historical,
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cultural, and literary aspects. K. K. N Kurup and K. Vijaya Kumar transcribed and pub-
lished it in 1995 (reprinted in 2012) with a short introduction.33 They have kept the lan-
guage of the manuscript intact, but they have changed all the Hijri and Kollam years
into Common Era years. In their brief introduction they mention that the document was col-
lected by the British from the Valiya Qāḍī of Calicut, but they do not provide any reference
and it is questionable on the basis of the Wye colophon. There are a few errors too in their
transcription.
Because we have John Wye’s translated text from 1800 and Sebastian Prange has pub-
lished it recently, there is no point in retranslating the entire text once again. Here I shall
direct the readers’ attention to a few important omissions in Wye’s translation along with
a few missing or mistaken translations in the Wye manuscripts (and consequently
Prange’s transcription), as well as the transcription into Malayalam by Kurup and Kumar.
In Wye’s translation, the missing sentences are (a) the first sentence: Hariḥ. Kēraḷattile
varttamānaṅṅal iniyum parayunnu which means, “God. Telling again the narratives of
Kerala.”34 The title Kēraḷa Varttamānam must have emerged from this first sentence, for
nowhere in the text or document there is any indication of a title. In the manuscript, the
title is written by a different hand; (b) the last two sentences in Sanskrit and Malayalam
we transliterated and translated above, on the completion and source of the text. To repeat
it with its translation: “Śrī gurubhyō namaḥ subhastuḥ ī varttamānam kollam 25
Karkaṭakam 967nu koḻikkoṭṭa kātiyāruṭe kissāvil ninnu paṟaññu eḻutippatatre” which
means, “Blessings and salutations to the guru, this is the good end. This account
(varttamānam) has been written down on dictation from the kissa of Calicut’s qāḍī on
25 Karkaṭakam 967 KE” [1792 CE];35 (c) taṅṅaḷil eṇaṅṅi koḻikkoṭṭa ora koṭṭa iṭuvān
samatikkukayum ceytu, or “they reconciled with each other and agreed to establish a fort
in Calicut.”36 This is in relation to the treaties in the year 1514–15. (d) ā koṭṭappaṇi
tīrunnatinte munpe ā kollattil tanne tāmūtiri rājāva tīppeṭukayum ceytu, or “the king
Zamorin died that year itself before the construction of the fort was over.”37 The fort
referred to here is the Cāliyam Fort. All these are full sentences, but there are also a few
words missing in other spots, such as “and the Mappilas” in a sentence about the fort.
The Arabic names for people or months have been translated so wrongly that it would
seem to no one that these are Arabic months. This comes along with the repeated translit-
eration of tārīkh (the date) as an alien term Talika.
In Kurup and Kumar’s transcription, the major problem is that they have converted all
the dates into Common Era years, and some of these converted years are not accurate.
Wye’s translation has kept both original dates (the Kollam and Hijri eras), but has not
converted them. Besides this, one important mistake in Kurup and Kumar’s transcription
is that the number of Nair militia who joined the Zamorin’s attack against Cochin in 1504
is nūṟāyiram (100,000), which has been transcribed as āṟāyiram (6,000). Wye has trans-
lated it correctly, and the Tuḥfa also provides the number as 100,000.
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Does the Pagan King Reply?
If we now accept that the Kēraḷa Varttamānam is not the exclusive voice of the Indian
king but a translation of the Arabic text, is there any other way to hear his voice in
his own language with regard to the Portuguese arrival? Yes, definitely there is. This
manuscript indicates the presence of a larger literary tradition that must have produced
a significant amount of historical materials, many of which must have been lost; yet
not entirely. There are several palm-leaf documents preserved across Kerala, some of
which have been digitised and preserved through such initiatives as the British
Library’s Endangered Archives Programme.38 For the history of the Zamorins in particu-
lar, the records from their Ponnāni palace have currently been preserved at the Vaḷḷattōḷ
Vidyāpīṭham and other private and informal collections. Several Indian historians have
studied and published them in the last two decades.39 These documents belong to a per-
iod from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and record various cultural, economic,
political, religious, and legal events in the dominion of the Zamorins. Most of those do
not engage with the Portuguese incursions directly, for they had much bigger concerns of
their own, yet they do provide intermittent references to the Europeans in general or the
Portuguese in particular, as we can see in the twelfth and fourteenth volumes of the
Koḻikkōṭan Granthavari.40
The most renowned Malayalam document on the history of Kerala, the Kēraḷōlpatti,
does provide a short account on the Portuguese arrival in the region. Historians have
questioned the authenticity of this text, for it delivers several anachronistic, mythical,
and ahistorical descriptions on the early history of the region. Even so, they have argued
that it does contain some historical grains of the region’s early medieval social and
political formations and transformations. They generally agree that it must have been
written in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, if not before.41 For the present focus,
its brief account on the Portuguese does not contradict any known historical facts or
events and therefore can be considered of historical value for the period. Under a subsec-
tion titled “Portuguese arrival and the relationship with the Kuṟumpiyātiri,” it says: “As
time passes, when the Portuguese landed at Calicut, established a fort, conducted com-
merce (a round-hatted captain from Pandy (Pāṇṭiparadēśi) named Arayil Kuṟiyan fought
against [the Portuguese]), conquered Calicut, ruined some of its shoreline. At a time
when everyone apart from Tinayanceri Iḷayatu had gone south for a battle, he [the
Portuguese] sent a letter to the Kuṟumpiyātiri Svarūpam, fetched them (by the grace
of Vēṭṭakkorumakan), ousted him through battle and conquered the fort. It is heard
that at that time they got a lot of wealth, jewels, commodities, and cannons.”42
In the following lines, the Kēraḷōlpatti describes the grace of the family deity
Vēṭṭakkorumakan that protected the land during the Portuguese assaults and provides fur-
ther details on the wars and booties. It moves on to enumerate the implications of these
battles and booty on the future trajectories of local chieftaincies. This short description
provides a Brahmanical/Hindu perspective on the Portuguese-Zamorin battles along
with a stint on the Muslim involvement. Its use of the term Pāṇṭipparadēśi (a foreigner
from Pāṇṭi) to denote possibly the Kuññāli Marakkārs might be an indication of the
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origin of the Marakkār family from the Coromandel Coast. Pāṇṭi is generally a
Malayalam term used for Tamils with indications to the Pandya genealogies, while
paradēśi indicates foreigners in general or the foreign Muslims in particular, as Duarte
Barbosa differentiates them from the local Mappila Muslims.43
With regard to the Portuguese happenstances however, another elaborate and import-
ant Malayalam text is the Kēraḷa-paḻama, which describes the first three decades of
Portuguese-Calicut encounters. It is a detailed account that “reads like a diary giving
day-to-day account of what happened” and “judged from its language and general
tone … [it] represents the Portuguese version of events.”44 The text was first published
by the German philologist Hermann Gundert at the Basel Mission Press in 1868 and it
was recently translated into English by T. Madhava Menon and published by the
International School of Dravidian Linguistics.45 It is written as a continuation to the
Kēraḷōlpatti that had only made passing reference to the arrival of the Portuguese.
The title pages of the first printed edition of the Kēraḷa-paḻama claim to describe events
from 1498 until 1631, but this is incorrect. It talks mainly about a period until 1530. The
whole monograph is centred on this, even though it does briefly mention in the last lines
the Dutch (Hōḷḷantar) victory against the Portuguese in Cochin in 1663.46
This text’s focus on the early sixteenth century is intriguing compared with the fact
that the Tuḥfa (and hence the Kēraḷa Varttamānam) also focuses on events until
1530–31. All these three texts describe the events after this period more haphazardly
and incoherently. Although the Kēraḷa-paḻama and the Tuḥfa (and hence the Kēraḷa
Varttamānam) have completely different narrative styles and contents, they all unite in
ending their major discussions at the same year in a chronological bracket. While the
emphasis of the Tuḥfa and the Kēraḷa Varttamānam makes sense with the latter being
an independent and free translation of the former, the same choice in the
Kēraḷa-paḻama is striking and needs further exploration into why these texts together
take this year as a primary endpoint. For the moment it suffices to say that the first
three decades seem to be a matter of great historical and historiographical importance
for the Malayalam and Arabic audience, authors, scribes, and translators.
In the Kēraḷa-paḻama, Gundert has brought together several sources in Malayalam
and other Indian and European languages. He prioritises the Portuguese narratives and
their legacies with accurate names and descriptions of their officials, admirals, and
kings while paying similar attention to their Malabari counterparts. This should be
read along with Chelnat Achyuta Menon’s statement that the text is a Portuguese version
of the events while the Kēraḷa Varttamānam is a Muslim version of the same.47
Notwithstanding these aspects, the Kēraḷa-paḻama definitely provides a Malayali/
Calicut perspective, for it uses a lot of peculiar contexts and names which are otherwise
not known in other sources and gives versions of encounters, narratives, and events that
are not in the best-known Portuguese, Dutch, and French accounts.48 Most of its infor-
mation must have been noted down by someone who had witnessed the events in person,
unless they are fanciful imaginings and additions by Gundert himself. Unfortunately the
text does not provide an indication of its sources. However, two correspondences from
the Zamorins’ palace records demonstrate that Gundert had access to materials kept at
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available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115319000536Does the Pagan King Reply? 437
the royal library, and a handsome portion of Kēraḷa-paḻama’s accounts on Calicut’s role
must have come from those sources.49 A closer study of the text would reveal its histor-
ical, historiographical, literary, and linguistic characteristics and contributions.
Conclusion
The Kēraḷa Varttamānam is definitely a translation of the Arabic text Tuḥfat
al-mujāhidīn. It is not an original Malayalam text belonging to the granthavari tradition
as Prange has argued. Therefore, it does not afford “a distant echo of the pagan king
speaking at last.” Through the intermediation of an Arabic-literate Muslim scholar and
a Malayalam-literate Hindu scribe, the Tuḥfa was rendered as the Kēraḷa Varttamānam
in the sixteenth, or most probably in the eighteenth, century. It is intriguing to note
that the Wye translation has intentionally or inadvertently removed the source of its
Malayalam original.
The very existence of this translation in the eighteenth century, if not before, points
towards the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic interactions between the Arabic and
Malayalam spheres of premodern Malabar. The text demonstrates one of the first instances
in which Malayalam literature addresses such a secular and historical theme as the arrival
of the Portuguese. One precedent, if not successor, to this genre in Malayalam literature
would be the seventeenth-century war-song on the Portuguese-Dutch battle in the 1660s
in and around Cochin with the leading participation of the rulers of Calicut and Cochin.50
Particularly on the Portuguese arrival and its immediate aftermath, we have to await
further input to learn what the Zamorin rulers of Calicut and their subordinates said,
thought, and did through and beyond their palace records. However, while we search
for such “indigenous” voices or sources on the Portuguese arrival, we should not dis-
credit the indigeneity of such Arabic texts as the Tuḥfat al-mujāhidīn, which was written
by a Muslim scholar who was born and brought up in a family that had long settled in the
Malabar Coast. If we discredit their indigeneity for the fact that it was written in Arabic
or by a Muslim, we inadvertently add to the charged Indian right-wing discourses that
portray Muslims as foreigners and invaders. In addition, we also should not succumb
to the opposite notion that the Tuḥfa is the only indigenous text available from the region
for the fact that Kēraḷa Varttamānam and the Wye manuscript are its translations. Works
such as the Malayalam texts Kēraḷōlpatti and Kēraḷa-paḻama can stand as clear voices
from Malabar on the Portuguese arrival and consequent episodes. Further investigations
into local sources in Malayalam, Sanskrit, and other Indic languages that are now being
uncovered and digitised will likely shed more light there. This approach is more product-
ive than usual excuses about the absence of sources.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Abhishek Avtans and Gijs Kruijtzer (Leiden University, the
Netherlands), V.V. Haridas (Calicut University, India), Abbas Panakkal (Griffith
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available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115319000536438 Mahmood Kooria
University, Australia), Abhilash Malayil (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel), and two
anonymous peer-reviewers for their inputs on the earlier drafts of this article and/or their
help with the source materials. I am also thankful to Daniel Lowe of the British Library
and Edward Weech of the Royal Asiatic Society for facilitating consultation of the manu-
scripts despite of my untimely requests. I wrote this paper while working in the project
“Understanding Sharia: Past Perfect, Imperfect Present”, funded by the Humanities in
the European Research Area (HERA). I am also grateful to the project team.
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